News & Events
Open Innovation
Procter
& Gamble has an internal goal of sourcing 50% of new ideas from
outside the business - the collabortive web is key to delivery this
goal.
On
demand, online networks are benefiting real businesses and
organisations. Cisco, Philips, Ernst and Young, IBM...... have taken
the plundge into the new world of social media and are benefiting from
increases in innovation, customer satisfaction and sales
For most companies, innovation is a proprietary activity conducted largely inside the organisation in a series of closely managed steps. Over the last decade, however, a few consumer product, fashion, and technology businesses have been opening up the product-development process to new ideas hatched outside their walls—from suppliers, independent inventors, and university labs.
How we can help you to exploit social media to improve innovation and knowldege transfer.
- Review your current innovation and KT processes to see where social media (online collaboration and communication) can add value
- Develop a social media strategy including key success metrics
- Assess your current online activity and technologies
- Deploy or develop social media tools that will help you achieve your objectives
- Integrate with what you already have - no need to reinvent the wheel
- Educate and upskill users to ensure the tools are used and fully exploited
Henry Chesbrough Explains Open Innovation
Henry Chesbrough, who coined the term, describes in his book "Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology" (2003) how companies have shifted from so-called 'closed' innovation processes towards a more open way of innovating. Here is a short video where he summarises his thinking on Open Innovation.
Executives in a number of companies are now considering the next step in this trend toward more open innovation. For one thing, they are looking at ways to delegate more of the management of innovation to networks of suppliers and independent specialists that interact with each other to cocreate products and services. They also hope to get their customers into the act. If a company could use technology to link these outsiders into its development projects, could it come up with better ideas for new products and develop those ideas more quickly and cheaply than it can today? Suppose that a wireless carrier, say, were to orchestrate the design of a new generation of mobile devices through an open network of interested customers, software engineers, and component suppliers, all working interactively with one another.
This is the model of innovation as a convergence of like-minded parties. Increasing numbers of organizations are now taking that approach: distributed cocreation, to use its technical name. LEGO, for instance, famously invited customers to suggest new models interactively and then financially rewarded the people whose ideas proved marketable. The shirt retailer Threadless sells merchandise online—and now in a physical store, in Chicago—that is designed interactively with the company’s customer base. In the software sector, open-source platforms developed through distributed cocreation, such as the “LAMP” stack (for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python), have become standard components of the IT infrastructure at many corporations. What facilitates this new approach to innovation is the rise of the Web as a participatory platform. What will drive its adoption by an increasing number of companies is the growing competitive need to uncover many more good ideas for products and to make better and faster use of those ideas.
